Whenever I finished with one subject, he nodded for me to continue, seeming content to listen to my news of the outside world which was all I could speak of calmly. My inner world trembled under his steady gaze, although nothing in his expression indicated displeasure (or pleasure either) with what he saw looking at and through me. Was I, in those sorrowful dark eyes, the returned prodigal who had strayed too far and lost too much? Or was it his constant world sorrow I saw reflected there? And his anger too when I told him about the concentration camps that had been uncovered in Germany after the Allies broke through. I described the lantern slides shown to us in UNRRA orientation lectures - the hillocks of emaciated bodies the Nazis had not had time to burn in crematory ovens before the breakthrough. 'Hasnamus things, Mr. Gurdjieff," I said, using his own strange word for forces of evil. He had apparently not heard of those camps and ovens. As he listened, hunched over and motionless, his face darkened and a vein in his forehead swelled and beat. I saw the wrath of God in that clouded countenance, a righteous fury that seemed about to explode, though there was no change of expression, only of coloring. Later, inside Germany, when I would see other things for which there was no name, I was to remember that look of holy wrath for man's repetitive inhumanity to man. The memory would lift my own inner fury from subjective to something resembling objective anger.
